Was he being watched? Was it a test? All thoughts of running off had entirely deserted Rudi when he found himself going through the passport and security checks. He sat where he was and drank his coffee, enthralled by the awfulness of it all.
The flight itself was the kind of thing where you only got a seat and the attendants selling you overpriced coffee and perfumes and airline-themed knicknacks. Ash had had some sandwiches made up at the Embassy and handed one over. Rudi prised it open and saw a wafer-thin slice of meat and gelatine trapped between two doorsteps of heavily-buttered white bread. He closed it again with a pained look on his face.
“Lunch tongue,” Ash said when he saw the look.
“I’ll just have a coffee, please,” Rudi said, handing the sandwich back.
“Well, if you don’t want it…” Ash said, tucking in.
And a couple of hours later they were in England, landing at Stansted, queuing up at Passport and Immigration. When the passport officer asked him the purpose of his visit, he had to bite down an urge to say that he was starring in a very, very bad spy movie.
To Rudi’s mind, the favoured way of getting a high-profile Package out of a country if you were a sovereign nation would be in a private jet under diplomatic cover, no security or customs officials at either end, car waiting on the tarmac on arrival to whisk him down the motorway to his destination. He was almost in a dream state as they took the train into London and then the Underground to Blackfriars and then walked along the Embankment of the Thames a short distance to a place Ash called ‘The Temple.’
Which turned out not to be a temple at all, but a set of quiet, linked squares of tall terraced buildings and gardens that tilted down to the Embankment. Ash led Rudi to one of the buildings – as they entered Rudi saw a hand-lettered sign, at the top of which were the words ‘Smithson’s Chambers’ above a list of names – in the entryway of which waited an incredibly tall and imposing-looking American man who shook his hand firmly and said, “You call me ‘Red,’ okay?”
And that was Rudi, stolen from Estonia by the SAS, babysat by MI6, and delivered into a Kafkaesque dream.
3.
AT WEEKENDS, THE area was deserted. You got some tourists wandering up and down Fleet Street, but it didn’t start to get busy until you were past the High Court and heading towards Trafalgar Square. On a Sunday, you could walk up out of the Mitre Court gateway onto Fleet Street, and for minutes on end you wouldn’t see another living soul.
Weekdays were different. Then, Fleet Street was a main artery between Westminster and the City. A shockwave of commuters emerged from the stations at City Thameslink and Blackfriars and Farringdon and Temple and Chancery Lane between about eight and ten. Passengers on the top decks of passing buses, all bent in unison over their morning news or novel, seemed to lean forward in anticipation of the day’s work. And then in the evenings it all happened in reverse. The commuters were swallowed by their stations, the bus passengers regarded their Evening Standards or went back to the chapter of the novel they were reading that morning. Rudi had been watching it for almost seven weeks, and he thought he had life in London more or less summed up by now. It was tidal, like its river, a great flood of humanity washing in and out of the Capital. And at some point the tide had washed him in.
“Hey, there,” Mr Bauer said cheerfully, passing through the living room on his way to the study. “How’s our boy today?”
“I’m very well, thank you, Mr Bauer,” Rudi replied in English.
Mr Bauer came to a stop in the middle of the worn Afghan rug and regarded Rudi with his hands on his hips. “Now how many times have I told you?” he asked. Rudi was about to say it must have been ten or fifteen times, but Mr Bauer went on without waiting. “It’s ‘Red,’ son. Nobody calls me ‘Mr’ Bauer.”
“Mr Self does,” answered Rudi, and he watched Mr Bauer’s eyes disconnect slightly as he tried to process the answer.
Mr Bauer was an American with the aspect of a mighty but ruined building. Well over two metres tall, and impressively broad-shouldered, he strode through the Temple like Ozymandias, his great mane of white hair blowing in the wind, dispensing hail-fellow-well-mets to his fellow barristers, whether he knew them or not. You had to get a little closer to Mr Bauer to see the pockets of his suit, which were ruined from carrying things which were never meant to be carried in the pockets of suits, to see the ruddy good-health on his cheeks resolve into spiders’-webs of broken veins, to see the scuffed and worn-down heels of his once-magnificent GJ Cleverley shoes.
Mr Bauer’s eyes snapped back into focus. “But, hey,” he said, wagging a finger at Rudi. “You have to call me ‘Red,’ okay?”
“Okay,” Rudi said, laying his book aside.
Mr Bauer raised his impressive eyebrows. “We have a deal, now, don’t we?”
Rudi nodded. “We have a deal,” he said dutifully from his chair on the other side of the room. “Red.”
“That’s the spirit!” Mr Bauer proclaimed. “We have a deal. Yes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to, um…” and he turned and left the way he had come in.
Rudi sat where he was for a while. He looked at the book lying face-down on the table beside his armchair. William Shirer, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. Mr Bauer’s rooms were full of old paper books, some of them almost a century old. It was impossible, from examining the titles, to discern what Mr Bauer was actually interested in, unless he was interested in everything. History books rubbed shoulders with the manuals of computer operating systems long-forgotten except in certain parts of the Third World, where the obsolete discarded flotsam and jetsam of the Computer Age had come to rest in the name of Aid. Great stacks of film-star biographies, most of dispiriting thickness. Novels in such broken-spined and dog-eared profusion that it seemed impossible that one lifetime would be enough to read them all. Two cookbooks, one which seemed to be a first edition of the River Café Cookbook, and the other a bizarre little spiral-bound volume with a cartoon dog’s face grinning on the cover beneath the words Let’s Cook With Hari Vex! Hari Vex – if it was indeed he – appeared to be a Bernese Mountain Dog, and the recipes inside seemed to have been assembled by a chef on the verge of a catastrophic nervous breakdown.
Fortunately, for matters culinary – and much else – Mr Bauer had Mrs Gabriel, brown-haired, pigeon-chested guardian of laundry and kitchen, keeper of the keys, and the only person in Smithson’s Chambers who actually knew where everything was, or could at least locate it while it was still needed or indeed vaguely relevant. She wore thick brown stockings and a hideous blue nylon housecoat over her street clothes, and flat shoes with soles composed of some substance which caused her to scuff up cracking little charges of static electricity, so that it was possible to hear her approaching across the Chambers’ worn carpets like a tiny electrical storm. Rudi had invested some time in wondering about her relationship to Mr Bauer. Wife? Daughter? Mistress? Nurse? And then it had all become clear; Mrs Gabriel was Mr Bauer’s housekeeper, and therefore transcended all those merely temporal descriptions. Without Mrs Gabriel, Mr Bauer would not only have been unable to function; he would have been unable to exist at all. Mrs Gabriel was a steady cook of the unadventurous English type, whose heavy food and nourishing gravies had sustained generations of public schoolboys all the way back to the days of the Great Game. It wasn’t that Rudi disliked her food, exactly, but when she brought her steak-and-kidney pies to the table, with their ritual accompaniment of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots and boiled peas, the Limoges gravy boat carrying its velvety cargo in their wake, he felt a dark wing of depression fold around him. He would have suggested other English dishes, perhaps á la Fergus Henderson, but he suspected the first mention of roasted marrow bones would galvanise Mrs Gabriel and her fellow housekeepers into a moonlight assault on Smithson’s Chambers with pitchforks and scythes and burning torches.